Photograph by Barbara Gilman. Notophthalmus viridescens – red eft, Monroe, New York. The red eft is a juvenile stage of the eastern newt. We used to see many of them in that area, but now they have become uncommon. While we are on the subject of evolution, eft and newt, the words, share a common ancestor. The middle English word for newt was ewte, depending whose spelling you like, and I assume the double-u was...
Matt Young
http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

Of course, it never really disappeared, as Michael Zimmerman notes in an article in the Huffington Post this past week. I will not go into detail, but according to Professor Zimmerman, a committee of the Texas State Board of Education had voted 6-2 to remove four standards that had been added in 2009, more or less at the last minute. Suffice it to say that the standards had been supported by Don McLeroy when he...
Matt Young
http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

NCSE informs us that Cope vs. Kansas State Board of Education, which we reported on here and here, has been appealed to the US Supreme Court. The Court of Appeals had upheld the District Court’s earlier dismissal of the case, largely on the basis of standing. Here, with permission, is NCSE’s report on the appeal: COPE et al. v. Kansas State Board of Education et al., the creationist lawsuit seeking to reverse Kansas’s 2013 decision...
Matt Young
http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

RSS Syndication

Antievolutionists Say the Darndest Things

Antievolutionists often express outrage over alleged incivility from those who oppose their efforts to evade the establishment clause of the First Amendment. But they have no difficulty in dishing out the abuse themselves. Here is a sample from the Invidious Comparisons thread that documents egregious behavior on the part of the religious antievolution advocates.

IDC advocate Phillip E. Johnson:

Gould’s uncomfortable situation reminds me of the self-created predicament of Mikhail Gorbachev in the last years of the Soviet Empire. Gorbachev recognized that something had gone wrong with the Communist system, but thought that the system itself could be preserved if it was reformed. His democratic friends warned him that the Marxist fundamentalists would inevitably turn against him, but he was unwilling to endanger his position in the ruling elite by following his own logic to its necessary conclusion. Gould, like Gorbachev, deserves immense credit for bringing glasnost to a closed society of dogmatists. And, like Gorbachev, he lives on as a sad reminder of what happens to those who lack the nerve to make a clean break with a dying theory.